The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: On Subtitling Fengming: A Chinese Memoir

Journal of Chinese Cinemas ISSN: 1750-8061 (Print) 1750-807X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjcc20 The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: On Subtitling Fengming: A Chinese Memoir Akiyama Tamako To cite this article: Akiyama Tamako (2019): The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: On Subtitling Fengming:�A�Chinese�Memoir, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, DOI: 10.1080/17508061.2018.1522814 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1522814 Published online: 31 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjcc20 Journal of Chinese Cinemas https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1522814 The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: On Subtitling Fengming: A Chinese Memoir Akiyama Tamako rikkyo university, Tokyo, Japan ABSTRACT This essay steps into the long history of translation theory, which is replete with examples of translators contemplating their own work of transporting a text from one language to another and deploying metaphors to theorize the task of the translator. The author, a student of Chinese aesthetics and contemporary philosophy, is also a veteran subtitler. In this essay, she describes her own subtitling of Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. She begins with a common observation about film translation: Facing extreme limitations in space and time, subtitlers often mourn the many limitations with which they must contend and look with envy at the translators of literature, who appear so free. But the strictures of subtitling can also produce a certain kind of freedom. Akiyama’s essay uses the subtitles for Fengming to illustrate the liberatory possibilities hidden within the act of translation. KEYWORDS China; cinema; documentary; film; He Fengming; translation; subtitling; Wang Bing Prologue The title of this essay – ‘The Liberty Coerced by Limitation’ – may feel rather eccentric. If one is a translator, I suspect one palpably senses a constant lack of freedom. The history of translation and translation studies is filled with countless attempts to trace the impossibilities of translation but, at the same time, root out something besides that kind of negative reality.1 This essay is another attempt to contemplate this antinomy, using the translation of Wang Bing’s experimental documentary Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming 2007) as a case study. Encountering Fengming I have been connected to the Chinese independent documentary scene ever since its emergence at the beginning of the 1990s. I have closely observed the creative process of the directors I have met and I have seen them progress by trial and error. And I have helped introduce their work to Japan through interpretation and translation. I first met the director Wang Bing at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2003. I subtitled the middle three hours of the nine-hour epic West of the Tracks CONTACT akiyama Tamako akiyama.tamako@nifty.com rikkyo university, Tokyo, Japan Translated by markus nornes, Professor of asian Cinema, university of michigan. © 2019 informa uK limited, trading as Taylor & francis Group 2 AKIYAMA T. (Tiexi qu 2003), which won the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize on the last day of the festival. Some years later, I met Wang in Beijing and he told me this story: Recently, I filmed an old woman who was a survivor of the Anti-Rightist Movement. I started shooting at twilight. Her story got increasingly tragic and intense as the day got darker and darker. Around the time it got so dark you couldn’t see, I asked her to turn on the light. She did, and the room suddenly became bright. Listening to him talk, I imagined that scene, with its cinematic flow of time, and thought about how hard it would be to translate. I hoped that I would have the opportunity to undertake the translation. Sure enough, I later received a request from the Yamagata International Documentary Festival to translate the film. When I saw the actual film for the first time, I came to realize that it was a three-hour film of an old woman talking about her life – a rather extreme example of the ‘talking heads’ documentary. I realized that this work would be far more difficult to translate than I initially imagined. The title character of the film, 74-year-old He Fengming, volunteered to become a journalist immediately after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. During the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, she was implicated as a Rightist due to columns written by her husband, who was also a journalist. They were sent to and interned in separate concentration camps and, unbeknownst to Fengming, her husband died of starvation. She herself managed to survive starvation and the grueling labor, only to be persecuted once again during the Cultural Revolution. Apart from the short, introductory following shot of Fengming tramping through the snow to her apartment, the film’s 183-minute running time consists of about ten shots of Fengming sitting on her sofa, narrating the story of her harsh life. Unlike West of the Tracks, this rather ascetic film does not draw on the power of the image itself. So how is it possible to pass on the power of such a film to audiences who don’t know Chinese? Conveying the power of a film that relies on language is one of the most difficult kinds of challenges for a film translator – and for a filmmaker. Wang Bing later told me, ‘I made a bet on the weakest element of cinema: language.’ Wang Bing felt that, as an element of cinema, language was powerless in comparison with sound and image. At the same time, this film was an experiment aimed at harnessing the power of language. When translating films, I always feel the weight of a responsibility I can never hope to meet; however, never has this responsibility been so heavy as it was with Fengming. No film had forced me to think as deeply about translation and the work of art as this film did. ‘Limitations’ and the Systematization of Film Subtitles in Japan When the arts undergo interlingual translation, one faces the difficulty and impossibility of moving from one ‘semiotic system’ to another ‘semiotic system (Jakobson 1959).’ In the case of film subtitling, one must also confront the particular spatiotemporal limitations presented by audiovisual media. In order to think through those ‘limitations’, let us first look at the origins of subtitling in Japan. The first subtitles in Japan were produced in 1931 for the Hollywood film Morocco (Figure 1 1930). The ‘talkies’, these foreign films accompanied by sound, were so different from silent cinema that translation initially proved a challenge. Distributors experimented with a variety of possibilities, including using silent-film-style intertitles that explained the JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 3 Figure 1. Morocco (1930) was the first subtitled film in Japan. plot, or relying on benshi, popular silent film-era live narrators who would talk over the film’s soundtrack. Eventually, they settled on using the newly invented subtitle. The rules that were established with the subtitling of Morocco remain the basic principles governing Japanese film translation. Through a process of trial and error, Morocco’s translator Tamura Yukihiko arrived at the following principle, which may seem obvious today: ‘Measure the length of a line, and turn it into Japanese that can be read in the time of the utterance, and make that the subtitle’ (Shimizu 1992, 28). The ‘experiment’ Tamura conducted to determine the appropriate number of characters that could be used for a given subtitle length is quite interesting. He assembled a group of geisha from Yokohama. He showed them various subtitled versions of Morocco that used different timings and character counts, listened to their feedback and determined that the number of characters they could effortlessly read in one second was four or less. Thus, from the very birth of subtitling in Japan, film translation was governed by this four-characters-per-second rule, with its close attention to frame rates, precise timing for the subtitles’ onscreen appearance, and its calculation of the limits for duration and comprehension. With the subtitling of Morocco, a certain deal (or ‘transaction’) was struck. Because of its precise timing in relation to the utterance; because of the way in which the subtitle instantly appears with speech and disappears with silence, as if extinguished, and because of the restrictions the apparatus places on the numbers of characters, which enables spectators to concentrate on the image without feeling physiologically burdened, the subtitling apparatus achieves a dream-like result. The limitations placed on subtitles allow viewers to feel as if they are able to directly comprehend foreign languages. Japanese subtitlers (myself included) accept the short end of this bargain – restrictions on characters for dream-like results – and they work within these limits. 4 AKIYAMA T. In Japan, it is often said that ‘Film subtitles are not translation’. This phrase is even the title of a posthumously published book by Shimizu Shunji (2002), who pioneered film subtitling with Tamura and others. The implication is that subtitlers must acknowledge that the character count is strictly limited, and, unlike literary translations, the reader cannot re-read the text. Of course, in the age of digital video, it is possible to pause, rewind and re-read; however, despite this development, translators are unwilling to break the terms of the deal, because lengthier subtitles would destroy the illusion of understanding languages one does not know. Shimizu argued that one ‘should not translate for accuracy’, but rather write ‘subtitles that can be understood by spectators’ instantly on the first read (2002, 72). With this kind of translation practice, the translator offers easy access to the language of the foreign film, although they provoke occasional debates about the appropriate ways to alter filmic texts. In his ‘Afterthoughts on “For an Abusive Subtitling”’, Nornes calls subtitles that overemphasize the easy consumption of meaning and vitiate the essence of cinema ‘sensible subtitles’ (2017).2 His analysis argues that ‘sensible subtitles’ tend to straighten out difficult and complex texts to target a mass (paying) audience, disregard the grain of the language of the original and make the foreign text conform to one’s own domestic values. For these reasons, Nornes considers conventional subtitles ‘corrupt’. In the practice of subtitle translation, the allure of corruption always lies in wait. That seduction is not limited to corruption, domestication and the abstraction of information, as in the example above. The following two examples from Fengming illustrate the omnipresence of this temptation and the way in which it is reinforced by the character-per-second limit. The Lure of ‘Corruption’ in Subtitle Translation Between Temptation and Responsibility The film begins with a tracking shot that follows an old woman walking through a snow-covered housing project in Lanzhou, with her back to the camera. She arrives at a dark apartment. In a cramped room, she sits on a sofa and with the following phrase, she begins a long monologue that covers half her life: ‘Wo xiang dui wo ziji tan yi tan’. (我想对我自己谈一谈) Direct translation: ‘I would like to talk to myself ’. Faced with the hard strictures of the subtitle, how might we translate this aphoristic utterance without creating a sense of incongruity? From the very beginning, the subtitle translator faces enormous hardship and feels the temptation of corruption. This utterance is three seconds long, 24 frames of film, so the Japanese subtitle must be 15 characters long or fewer. When translating the ideographic language of Chinese into Japanese, which combines the ideograms of kanji (Chinese characters) with the phonetic characters of hiragana and katakana, the character count generally increases by 50 percent. Furthermore, if one translates directly, it may be difficult for the viewer to grasp the meaning of the subtitle in an instant. Such complexity would be especially inappropriate for the first line, which should lure people into the film. As Shimizu says, it is basically impossible to re-read film subtitles (although, of course, the situation with video or digital recordings is different); the reader is unable to take any time to look closely at the text, as with a book. The English subtitle JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 5 reads, ‘Well, I guess I’ll start from the beginning’. (Figure 2) The translator has changed the line to a safe, appropriate beginning for a story. I was grateful for the English subtitles that I received along with the Chinese script. They were produced by Cindy Carter, a very talented subtitler who has worked closely with the director, so I naturally consulted them in the course of producing my own translation. Feeling the gravity of the incredible difficulty posed by this utterance, I considered the English subtitle for Fengming’s first utterance many times – ‘Well, I guess I’ll start from the beginning’ – and I might have fallen for temptation and performed a perfunctory translation. However, Fengming is, after all, saying, ‘Wo xiang dui wo ziji tan yi tan’, ‘I would like to talk to myself ’. After considering many options, I translated the first line as「自分に聞かせるつもりで 話すわね」/Jibun ni kikaseru tsumori de hanasu wa ne. In English, you could render this translation as ‘I intend to talk like I’m making myself listen’. By changing ‘talk to myself ’ to ‘make myself listen’, and xiang (think/hope) as tsumori (intend), it preserves the allegorical meaning of the old woman’s utterance while still feeling relatively natural in Japanese. Many Japanese critics commented on this scene directly in their reviews of the film. When I read this criticism, I was astonished at the influence my translation exerted on their understanding of Fengming. At the beginning of Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, He Fengming exclaims that she intends to talk to herself. First, a confrontation with the self. (Hata 2013, 30) An old woman in red clothing sits down on a sofa and chants. She begins with what feels like a magic spell: ‘I intend to talk like I’m making myself listen.’ (Kitakoji 2013, 249) Feeling the temptation of corruption, I could have used a Japanese translation like ‘I’ll start from the beginning’. That ‘translation’ would have seemed natural to most Japanese spectators, who would have felt no sense of incongruity. However, it might not have resulted in the reading of the film presented above. Once again, I was forced to consider the Figure 2. The Japanese subtitle for the first line of the film reads, ‘i intend to talk like i’m making myself listen.’ 6 AKIYAMA T. appropriateness of my choices and keenly felt the gravity of my freedom and of the responsibility entrusted to me as translator. Between Meaning and Grain The next example of the temptation of corruption is connected to the translation of speaking styles. Nornes argues that conventional subtitles from the past overemphasize the communication of content. He points out that the grain of the language – ‘the linguistic or literary styles of screenwriting’ or ‘the various aural and visual qualities of cinema’ – often seems to be lost (2004, 464). However, in a film like Fengming, which is uniquely structured as a three-hour monologue, the Japanese spectator may start sensing an incongruity – a sensation like hearing a dissonance – if the style of the Japanese subtitles does not communicate the grain of the original language. Due to this incongruity, the Japanese viewer of the film might fail to synchronize speech with the subtle expressions of the speaker. They might not notice the subtle transformations on screen and soundtrack, or they might simply leave the movie theater halfway through the film. When I am trying to determine the Japanese analogue for a character’s speaking styles, (and I believe that other translators do this as well), I consult the style of Japanese writers of the same age, gender and educational background as the characters.3 I do not mean there is some concrete relationship of influence between a Japanese writer and a character from the same generation. However, when I translate the speaking styles of characters of various backgrounds, generations and genders, having this reference point for what their Japanese might be like is an important strategy for avoiding the temptation to use my own style of speech.4 I called up Wang Bing and asked about the main character Fengming’s childhood background, which she does not cover in the film. Although she was not wealthy, she came from a family that valued education. I considered her background and character, thought about which Japanese writer’s speaking style would be closest to Fengming’s and most appropriate as a model for translation, and chose Ariyoshi Sawako. Ariyoshi was one year older than Fengming, and like Fengming, she entered university to study English literature in an era when the graduation rate for women was extremely low (although Fengming herself abandoned her university education after passing the entrance exam for English literature and instead pursued journalism). Ariyoshi was concerned with history and social problems and drew on these sources of inspiration for many wonderful works of literature and reportage. She used an approach based on careful research – another point of similarity with Fengming, who was an energetic journalist. Moreover, what I thought most closely tied the two was a talent for storytelling and a tenacious commitment to approaching history from the perspective of the individual. Out of all of Ariyoshi’s many works, I chose to use her masterful travelogue Two Women in New Guinea (Onna futari no Nyugiinia 1968) as a model. She writes in the first person, a technique that resembles the structure of Fengming, vividly communicating to the reader the scenery, sounds, heat and humidity. I kept it next to me as I translated. My original goal was to learn the ‘natural’ linguistic style of a woman of the same generation as Fengming. However, in reading that book, I noticed various thoughtful and beautiful techniques embedded in the simple structure of a single-person speaking, structures which can also be found in the film. Among them was the polyphony created by JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 7 Fengming’s mimicry of the other people that appear in her story. Consider the following reminiscence of Fengming’s. The torment and humiliation of being criticized as a Rightist for no apparent reason led her to consider suicide. She left her office to buy sleeping pills. She recalls how, along the way, she happened to meet her small child. (Emphasis mine) a. original Chinese & Direct Translation B. Japanese subtitle & Direct Translation (character limit) C. english subtitle 1. a. 我出办公室门的时候, 还遇见我的小儿子。 小儿子当时在 托儿所, When i walked out the door of my office. i happened to meet my younger son. at that time, my younger son was at the nursery. B. 職場から薬局に向かう時 下の子と出くわした (19) When i left work for the drug store i encountered my younger child. 2. a. 他喊： ‘妈妈,妈妈’。 he shouted, ‘mama, mama.’ B. ‘ママママ ’ (7) ‘mama, mama.’ 3. a. 我都没有理他。 i ignored him. B. 私はその声を無視した (10) i ignored his voice. C. leaving the office, i had run into my youngest son in the nursery. C. I remember him crying out for his mama, but i just ignored him. In the Japanese subtitles, I include what she relates just before this scene about being on the way to the drugstore, but I had to cut the mention of the nursery school because of the limited space. Apart from this omission, the biggest difference between the Japanese and English translation is the strategy for capturing her manner of speaking. In the film, Fengming uses a child’s high voice to say ‘Mama, mama’. The English subtitle translates the child’s utterance using indirect speech, ‘I remember him crying out for his mama’. Indeed, this indirect speech communicates the meaning of the words of the child crying, ‘Mama’, and if one only sought to convey the literal meaning, translating it only once could be sufficient. If I had combined phrases 2 and 3, as the English subtitle does, I might have had enough characters to include the phrase ‘nursery school’. Extending the temporal length covered by a subtitle relaxes the limitations on character count – an enticing temptation for the film translator. However, Fengming uses a high tone to say ‘Mama, mama’, reproducing the voice of her child. If one does not translate the repetition and make the subtitle appear simultaneously with her speech, there will not be a tight synchronization between screen and sound. After going back and forth about this, I sacrificed a bit of meaning – the nursery – in order to translate the grain of the language. This was a tough decision, because I recognized the important way ‘nursery’ indicated her son’s age, but I assumed the audience would imagine this through the Fengming’s performance of the child’s high-pitched voice. In her essays, Ariyoshi uses many different writing styles to represent the manner of speaking of people other than the narrator. By using this technique, first-person speech becomes a polyphony rich with contradictions. The reader sees things they otherwise would not see and vividly hear things that they otherwise would not hear in those people’s voices. When Fengming, the consummate storyteller (probably unconsciously) recreates her child’s voice with such sorrowful repetition, even though it is not depicted in the image on screen, the spectator is forced to imagine her tearing herself away from her anxious and innocent child. To aid that imagination through subtitles requires less attention to the content of what was said and more attention to how it was said. I came to this realization 8 AKIYAMA T. while reading the works of Ariyoshi. Ignoring the necessity of translating this way is not an option. The ‘Freedom’ of the Detour Critics now consider Fengming one of Wang Bing’s finest accomplishments, but there was almost no framework within which to judge its value back when I translated it. Subtitlers for film festivals are among the first viewers of the films they subtitle. Criticism they might have used for research only comes out after the films they are subtitling are screened. Therefore, my first important task before I begin to translate a film is to grasp the essence of the work from scratch. To better understand Fengming, I tried to find reference material, something I believe most translators do. I read Fengming’s original autobiography (2001); looked at works related to her story; researched the literature, history and geography of the setting in Gansu Province; and hunted down books about political history and related topics. And as I explained above, I also searched for Japanese writing where the style would approximate her manner of speech. All this research could do is help me to understand the content of her speech; it was insufficient for locating the secret of the film’s power. Most of what she talks about in the film overlaps with what she wrote in her autobiography. However, the book was not nearly as powerful as the film, and it was clear I could not produce a good translation of this film without locating the source of its power. Murakami Haruki is a novelist who has translated many works of literature, including works by Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Evening Stories on Translation (Honyaku yawa 2000) is the record of his conversations with Shibata Motoyuki, a celebrated translator and scholar of contemporary American literature. They assert that there are two essential elements of ‘good writing’: beat and swell. The beat is a ‘physical, actual rhythm’, while the swell is a wave ‘that is a larger cycle than a beat’ (2000). Murakami writes, When writing has no beats or swells, people simply won’t read it. No matter how beautiful the words or beautifully they’ve been strung together, if there are no beats or swells the writing can’t breathe properly (Murakami and Shibata 2000, 45). When I saw the initial draft version of my subtitles, I keenly felt the lack of swells. I remember a sense of fear while watching the preliminary mix. I remember thinking, ‘If the subtitles remain in this condition, people may see this film less as a “work” than as a monotonous oral history’. To meet my responsibilities to the film and the director, I reconceived my approach to the translation. Around that time, I went to see a noh play at a nearby noh theater. Suddenly, I felt I had a clear image of the kind of swell a film like Fengming has, which had been obscure to me up to then. Noh is an extremely simple, symbolic theatrical art. The main characters are the shite (lead) and waki (supporting role). The stories of every noh play by and large follow the same pattern: Once upon a time, a priest (waki) meets a single woman (shite, which is occasionally a male character) while traveling. They strike up a conversation, the story becomes serious and suspicious, and the priest comes to realize that the woman is no ordinary mortal. When he asks the woman about her true identity, she suddenly disappears. Weary, the traveler becomes drowsy. Suddenly, he awakes with a start and realizes it is already twilight and that he is JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 9 surrounded by darkness. At this moment, the woman from before suddenly appears in the beautiful form she had during the day. As she narrates her own story, she dances. Just when one thinks this scene is a vision or a dream, she abruptly disappears. After that, the only thing left is the wind blowing through the pine boughs. This is a typical pattern followed by noh.5 As I watched the noh being performed, I felt deep inside me Fengming’s figure suddenly merging with the shite. The beginning of the film, when Fengming is followed home by the camera, is remarkably similar to the entrance of a shite onto the noh stage via a traditional long bridge (hashigakari). The spectators are lured into an otherworldly space. A traveller accompanied by a camera, Wang Bing/waki, meets Fengming, and the encounter transforms her into a shite. In the center of her room/stage, Fengming/shite relates both beautiful and harsh reminiscences of her past. And in the utter darkness of the movie theater, the spectators come to share her grave memories. ‘Ah’, I realized, ‘Fengming is noh. It is theater about ghosts. I thought Fengming was an ordinary old woman, but actually when her falsely accused husband died, she did as well – just as if she were a shite’. Realizing this, the shape of the work suddenly appeared before me like a constellation coalescing from a thousand unrelated stars. I am not suggesting that Wang Bing was influenced by noh, nor am I suggesting that there is a direct relationship between noh and Fengming. If there is a relationship, it is that Fengming’s situation is similar to the topos in which noh emerged, where there must have been many people who were trampled by absolute absurdity, then forgotten by the world. The point I want to emphasize is this: Analogies to the known can help one grasp the unknown. For me, the analogy to noh – something with which I am familiar – allowed me to comprehend the unfamiliar within Fengming. If it were someone else, they would undoubtedly use a different analogy. For me, the ready analogue happened to be noh, and through noh I came to see the swell and flow of the entirety of the work entitled Fengming. I came to see that the apex of the story’s swell was the love between husband and wife and that the trough of the swell was the husband’s death. I felt that to communicate this film’s power, it was essential to translate according to the beats of noh, letting the work breathe and thus highlighting its swells. The Translation Practice of Fengming Translating Silence Please consider the next example – perhaps the most important swell in the film. The husband, having endured a violent criticism session, attempts suicide and fails. In this scene, Fengming quietly talks about that evening when the two were intimate. The image is very dark, so dark you can hardly make out her figure. We only hear her voice emanating from the darkness as she recalls a beautiful memory from her youth. This sequence could be compared to scenes from noh theater, particularly those in which the main character – the shite, who is a ghost – describes meeting her lover in a previous life. In these scenes, she takes on her most beautiful form, and over the course of a dance, the past and present merge. This is the peak of one of the story’s swells. As with the noh actor in her gorgeous costume, Fengming is placed before us in the darkness, which allows us to freely imagine how she appeared in her youth, something we cannot actually see. This is the image I took away from this scene. But how could I convey this image to viewers who do not understand Chinese? 10 AKIYAMA T. a. original Chinese & Direct Translation B. Japanese subtitle & Direct Translation (character limit) C. english subtitle 1. a. 我们也感到在这个苦难中 amidst all the pain and suffering we experienced… B. この苦しみの中で経験した―(13) ―amidst the suffering we experienced… (silence with no Japanese subtitle) 2. a. …的爱情 …… love B. 二人の愛には―(7) ―in the couple’s love C. in the midst of all that hardship, our love seemed sweeter than ever. 3. a. 特别甜蜜。 一种特殊的甜蜜, it was very sweet. it had a kind of special sweetness. B. 特別な甘美さがあった(13) it had a special sweetness. 4. a. 过去未尝经验过的甜蜜。 it was a sweetness we had never known before. B. かつて感じた事のない 甘美さだった(10) it was a sweetness we had never felt in the past. C. it was sweeter than anything we’d ever known. Figure 3. The Japanese translator divided the utterance into two subtitles, inserting a blank between them. As I grappled with this problem, I became aware of the liberty that results from being coerced by the limitations of subtitling. The subtitle is not a medium that translates only what is spoken. Unlike literature, the subtitle is a medium that also translates what is left unspoken – silence, or the interval. I wanted Fengming’s intense and beautiful image to leave a strong impression on the hearts of viewers. I therefore, to the best of my ability, tried to capture the intonation and intervals of her speech. It was necessary to create a sense of tension akin to that felt by spectators peering at actors on the noh stage – where viewers would hang on every word…. waiting with bated breath for the next utterance. With that goal in mind, what became absolutely crucial was the synchronization of subtitle and voice. After Fengming says, ‘Amidst all the pain and suffering we experienced…’ there is a moment of silence. She then completes the sentence, ‘….love’. As a highly educated, 74-year-old woman, Fengming, thinking about how she should describe what was possibly the last night they were intimate, hesitates. When she determines that, in the end, there is no other way to express her feelings except with the word ‘love’, it is as if a dam breaks. As she describes what happened, she uses the word ‘sweetness’ (tianmi) three times in a row, emphasizing the initial aspirated ‘t’, a sound like splashes of water. When the dammed-up feelings overflow into a whirlpool of emotion, the spectators can sense the reality and intensity of the couple’s love. JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 11 However, in the English language translation, a subtitle appears during the interval of her silence, so it is difficult for the spectator to sense that silence and the subsequent tumbling stream Figure 3. Because the title (‘In the midst of all that hardship, our love seemed sweeter than ever’) appears at the beginning and remains on screen even as she hesitates, most spectators know what she will say – ‘…love’ – before she says it. To have a subtitle precede the dialogue it translates is like giving away the secret of a magic trick. In this case, I felt it necessary to, in effect, translate the interval and leave her silence unsubtitled; this enabled the audience to notice her silence and evoked that intense feeling of ‘what will happen next?’ that one experiences when watching magic or theater. Benjamin argues for the crucial importance of form in ‘The Task of the Translator’, while noting, ‘It is self-evident how greatly fidelity in reproducing the form impedes the rendering of the sense’ (2000, 80). Many translators likely can sympathize with this sentiment. The equivalent in film translation to the ‘word for word’ approach that Benjamin polemically labels ‘true translation’ is an approach that insists on subtitles’ synchronization with sound and image, above and beyond linguistic form. To achieve a ‘true translation’ requires not just the translation of text but, as asserted above, the technique of tightly ‘spotting’, or timing, the appearance and disappearance of the subtitle. Sometimes translators themselves do this, but in the case of Fengming, the spotting was done by specialists. The contributions of this technical staff to subtitling are even more invisible than those of the film translators. However, they are ‘translating’ the flowing time of cinema through spotting. Thanks to their efforts, spectators can experience the feeling that they are immediately understanding Fengming. It is possible for the spectators to receive all sorts of information from the atmosphere of the scene, the grain of her voice and, yes, from her silence. Constructing Blanks Next, I would like to look at what Fengming says immediately after the scene discussed above. There we will find the second kind of ‘liberation’ I encountered. Original Chinese: Direct Translation: English Subtitle: Japanese Subtitle: 爱情的花朵在我们的苦难之中绽放了。 绽放得特别绚丽。 The flower of love bloomed amidst our suffering. It bloomed gloriously/gorgeously. During that time, our love seemed to blossom into something very beautiful. 苦しみの中で愛は咲き誇る花のようだった (22 characters) それは艶かな花だった (12 characters) Direct Translation of Japanese Subtitle: Amidst that suffering, our love was like a blossoming flower./It was a glorious/gorgeous flower. Consider the line「绽放得特别绚丽」(Direct translation: It bloomed gloriously/gorgeously). In the original Chinese, Fengming is not using direct terms to refer to her relationship. Instead, she refers to their intimacy in a humble, indirect way, using the metaphor of a blooming flower. If I had translated the phrase directly, it simply would have been too dramatic for a Japanese reader – it probably would have had a cheap feel. In Chinese poetry, rich poetic sentiment is often conveyed through the verbs, but in Japanese, poetic sentiment 12 AKIYAMA T. is usually expressed through nouns and adverbs. I only had 12 characters available for this subtitle. I hesitated and then finally used the following predicate nominative sentence: 「それは艶かな花だった」, ‘It was a glorious/gorgeous flower’. In Japan, there are many idioms involving hana (flowers). The noh poet Zeami once said, ‘If it is hidden, it is the flower’ (Hisureba hana). You could say that this means something like, ‘By hiding something away, you can evoke unexpected emotions in people’s hearts’. The poem ‘Flower in a Storm’ (‘Hana ni arashi’), a translation of the Yu Wuling poem ‘Offering Wine’ (‘Quan jiu,’ circa ninth century) by the novelist Ibuse Masuji, illustrates how good fortune attracts ruin. The word ‘flower’ has a doubleness that simultaneously reminds us of the prime of life and of beauty, as well as the emptiness of its decay. Even with a limited character count, I bet that I could use the word ‘flower’ to evoke both aspects of this moment: the intensity of the pair’s love and its transience. I placed another secret bet here. A direct Japanese translation of the word xuanli would be gokakenran. In English, this word would be translated as something like ‘gorgeous’ or ‘glorious’. However, gokakenran is such a showy, excessive word in Japanese that I felt it would make it difficult for the viewer to picture the intensity and tragedy of the two lovers’ tryst. After giving it some thought, I decided to modify the word ‘flower’ with the adverb 艶か. The kanji in that adverb, ‘艶,’ can actually be read in one of two ways: ade- and tsuya-. When characters have multiple readings like this, subtitlers use rubi, tiny characters adjacent to the subtitle, to specify a single, stable meaning. Most subtitlers fear that spectators will become confused if they do not use rubi (see Figure 4, right). In this case, however, I used no rubi. The first reading has a showy gorgeousness, if not a slightly erotic feel. The latter implies a more delicate, glossy beauty. I did not care if spectators read the subtitle as adeyaka or tsuyayaka. They might be imagining a rose, or a peony, or a waterlily. They could choose the reading that best fit the flower secreted away in their own hearts. I believed that the spectators would key into the vivid image of Fengming and her husband on their last night, into the overlapping horizon of Fengming’s strange tale and ‘one’s heart flower’. Later, when Fengming was released in theaters, I was struck by something the film critic Hata Sahoko published in a catalog. Hata is herself around Fengming’s age and rose to prominence as a critic of French New Wave films. Regarding Fengming, she wrote, For women, Fengming’s vivid memory of that evening when the two lovers’ hearts and bodies became one is something anyone can understand. It is a beautiful, erotic (艶, en), and painful memory (Hata 2013, 31). One could say the image Hata embraced was precisely the image I embraced. However, she did not pick up on this image because of the ‘correct translation’ of my subtitles. Indeed, my subtitles were hardly ‘correct translations’. On the contrary, they left many ‘blanks’ for the spectators to fill in. Because of the strict limit on the number of characters per second, I used the word 花 (flower) – a single character that embraces a multiplicity of images. I trusted that spectators had the ability to select from the plural readings of 艶か. You will notice that Hata used the character 艶 (en) in her essay; this suggests that the character triggered deep memories of her own – traces of the familiar past that intertwined with these strange sounds and images. JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 13 Deciding Tense In this last section, I want to discuss a scene that compelled me to investigate the hollows between the swells. After spending two and a half years in a different internment camp from that of her husband, Fengming was finally allowed to visit him at the Jiabiangou Internment Camp. She passed through desert-like areas and finally arrived at the camp, only to be informed that her husband had died several days before. The death of her husband hit Fengming like a thunderbolt. Because the station was too far away to reach before nightfall, Fengming resigned herself to spending the night at Jiabiangou and sleeping on the dirt, in a dugout covered with wooden planks. She then describes spending the night in this cave, as isolated from the world as the internment camp in which her husband had lived. Fengming looked up at the ceiling filled with cracks and sees a sky filled with stars (Figure 4). There she ‘discovered’ ghosts looking down at her. In retelling this story, she is a. original Chinese & Direct Translation B. Japanese subtitle & Direct Translation (character limit) C. english subtitle 1. a. 醒来看见天上，/ i woke up and saw the sky B. 天を仰ぐとWhen i looked at the sky, (8) 2. a. 能看到蓝天，能看到星星。/ i could see the clear sky; i could see the stars. B. 漆黒の空と星とが見えた (13) i could see the jet black sky and stars 3. a. 我就想，这个地窝子的人可能都死光了吧。/ i thought, all the people in this trench must have died. B. ここの住人は皆死んだのね (12) everyone living here died, didn’t they? 4. a. 他们可能在,/ They may be here. B. でも多分― (7) But, probably… 5. a. 他们的阴魂并没有离开这个地窝子 / Their ghosts may not have left the trench. B. その亡霊はまだここにいる(13) Their ghosts are still here. C. i remember lying awake and looking up at the stars. C. i kept thinking about all the men who had died in this cave. C. maybe they were still here… maybe their spirits never left. 6. a. 他们也许 / They may B. こちら側を― (9) Toward this side… (silence with no Japanese subtitle) 7. a. 从那个地窝子顶上的缝隙里向里面窥视着。/ be peering down into the trench through the cracks in the roof. B. 屋根の隙間からのぞいているはず (16) …they must be peering through the cracks in the roof, 8. a. 想看看这里面到底发生了什么事情。/ wanting to see will happen in the end. B. 一体何が起きるか気になって… (16) wondering what is happening here. Figure 4. feng ming closes her eyes as she re-experiences her past. C. maybe they were peeping down into the cave through the cracks, C. wondering what was happening here. 14 AKIYAMA T. not fearful. On the contrary, she slows down, and haltingly, while sobbing, she describes the dead who have become ghosts – including her husband – with an intimacy that is startling. Fengming lightly closes her eyes and talks about the ghosts who, concerned, watch over the humans on the earth’s surface. This scene is not about a living person caring for the dead but, rather, dead people caring for the living – an inverted vision, and one in which Fengming crosses over the border between the living and the dead. In this scene, I was very unsure which tense to use, and in the second draft, I revised the conjugation in one place. Chinese is a language without tense. Thus, when translating into a language with tense, like Japanese, the translator must (consciously or unconsciously) decide on which tense to use. The English subtitles generally used the past tense form for scenes that described past events. By way of contrast, while I used past tense up to the point where she looks up at the stars (2B), when, surrounded by these visions in the dark of night and she begins her soliloquy – ‘Everyone living here died, didn’t they?’ (这个地窝子的人可能都死光了吧) (3B) – I shifted gears into the present tense (4-8B).6 In languages with tense, the historical present tense is often used when a past event is represented as if it were happening in the present. However, I did not use present tense simply to capture the vividness with which she recalled the past. When Fengming’s husband died, her time became tethered to his – that is to say, at this moment, her soul dies and, like the shite of noh, she becomes a ghost. My use of present tense was a bet that it was possible to convey this transformation, if only in a limited way. Individual time does not always flow at a uniform speed. At one point, it will stop as if frozen; at another point, it might flow backward. Film and literature often represent this kind of stream of time, and this representation is certainly one of the sources of Fengming’s power. This entire work could be seen as one long flashback.7 With the tense-less narration of Fengming, Chinese language spectators repeatedly traverse the boundary between past and present, and, in this way, living humans and ghosts might encounter each other. So how should this ambiguity be translated into a language with tense? The original language has no direct index for how tense should be translated. It is up to the translator. This was the most terrifying ‘liberty’ I encountered while translating this film. Why should I use past tense here? Why should I use present tense there? Is a given choice justified? As I moved toward a final draft, I constantly second-guessed my judgments, which felt arbitrary. I felt as if I were exceeding my authority. After the film was shown publicly, the playwright Ooka Jun wrote his thoughts about the film in an exchange of comments on Facebook. It was then that I realized what a profound ‘liberty’ this work offers not just the translator, but also the audience. He writes: The night she learned that her husband had died was most awesome. Of course, it was also the most saddening. However, in the writings on Siberia by Ishihara Yoshiro8 there is the phrase that goes something like, ‘There is nothing more absurd than seeing a beautiful sky amidst conditions of despair.’ I recalled this quote. (Ooka 2013). What this film captures is nothing other than the visage of Fengming as she sits on her sofa. But in watching the film Ooka saw Fengming’s night sky, and in her night sky, he saw the azure sky of Siberia with its absurd beauty. The multiple spaces and times experienced by multiple people are unexpectedly twisted together to create an original time and vision. Each spectator sees their own vision, experiences their own time and space – wasn’t this the ambition Wang Bing had for this work? JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 15 In Japan, this experimental work eventually went on to win the grand prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, enjoyed a national theatrical distribution, a DVD release, and was made the subject of a scholarly book. The Japanese subtitles continue today – in the progressive tense – Wang Bing’s attempt to use the spoken word to unfold a limitless image for the audience and to tie together countless visions. Epilogue Especially due to its austerity, Fengming is a work that grants profound liberty to its spectators. One of the responsibilities of the translator of this work is to preserve the liberty that Chinese language spectators enjoy for spectators who rely on the subtitles. Working toward that end, translators must determine what kind of words to select – or slough off – plunging them into a liberty that can be terrifying. Film translators are hardly the only people confronted by the problems of liberty and responsibility. Konosu Yukiko, who has re-translated Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, is one of Japan’s finest literary translators. She has said, ‘Translating is like shining light on a sphere’ (Konosu 2014). No matter where the light lands, shadows are cast on the surface. Any conscientious translator – not just subtitlers – know the impossibility of an absolutely accurate translation.9 Nevertheless, the translator has the liberty and responsibility to decide how to cast the light so as to give the viewer a clear image of the entire sphere, from the brightly lit surfaces to its shadows – this is to say, the geography of the film’s power. There is little difference between the liberty and responsibility conferred upon us and that on literary translators. If there is a difference between the literary translator and the film subtitle translator, it is that the light the subtitler casts is capable of illuminating far less of the surface due to the limits imposed by the subtitle. Limits naturally change what strategies are available. Let us rethink Konosu’s metaphor. What would happen if we were to introduce a single mirror directly behind the sphere? At just the right angle, the light would hit both the sphere and the mirror behind it, and we could observe the light reflected from the mirror onto the dark hemisphere. Light is not only cast directly onto the sphere of the text; each spectator holds a mirror. If the light is cast at the right angle, and the spectator is holding the mirror in the right position – if these two conditions are (happily) met, light is reflected onto the shadowy regions of the sphere inaccessible to the translator’s light. The mirror Hata holds up is her earnest, lived experience; Ooka holds up the words of the poet who sublimated his harsh experience of Siberian internment into literature. This is how these particular viewers see into the powerful dark regions of Fengming. The aims of a subtitler should not be limited to simply supplying a single, clear image. Sometimes a suitable translation creates ‘blanks’ for a spectator to freely fill in. A translation with ‘blanks’ is not a makeshift or deceptive translation. On the contrary, to elucidate the essence of a work in a limited number of characters, we must carefully determine what kind of ‘blanks’ can be created and use them appropriately. After those ‘blanks’ have left the hand of the translator, they can cause an unexpected flower to bloom in the heart of the spectator. This is the liberty coerced by the severe limitations of subtitling. It is a grace – or a flower – unintentionally conferred by the subtitler. 16 AKIYAMA T. Notes 1 For example, Michaël Outstinoff ’s La Traduction (2008, 16-17). 2 In this essay, Nornes rethinks and redefines what he called ‘corrupt subtitles’ and ‘abusive subtitles’ in his book Cinema Babel (Nornes 2007). 3 Of course, China’s particular history and political environment exerts serious linguistic influence over He Fengming’s speaking style, an environment that is, of course, not reflected in the ‘natural’ expressions of Japanese writers of the same generation. Therefore, I must sometimes employ a different strategy. 4 This strategy of ‘free’ translation that prioritizes the target language can be traced back to Roman translations of the Greeks and peaked with seventeenth–eighteenth century translation practice in France. However, starting from the end of the eighteenth century, this mode came under critique. By the standards of Romantic aesthetics, which emphasized the originality of works of art, this mode was a sacrifice of ‘fidelity’. I am not seeking to translate with a ‘freedom’ that ignores the original work; on the contrary, I consult these other models of speech to avoid the conventional tendency of using styles of speech close to one’s own, thereby adding a further ‘limit’ on translation. I will closely consider the problem of ‘the limit’ in translation in the following sections of this essay. 5 For the structural importance of the waki, see Yasuda (2006). 6 Ariyoshi sometimes would insert monologue in between past and present tense to make the transition feel natural. Here, Fengming does the same thing with ‘zhege diwozi de ren keneng dou siguang le ba.’ 7 There is a scene where the sun sets, the room becomes completely dark and, at Wang Bing’s suggestion, Fengming turns on the light. It is an important scene because of the way in which it forcibly interrupts the flashback and suddenly pulls the spectators back to the present time. 8 Ishihara Yoshiro is a leading poet in postwar Japan. After the war, he was imprisoned in Siberia for eight years. He is known for the essays and poems he wrote about his harsh experiences in the prison camp. 9 In 1928 André Gide made the eccentric comment that translation ‘where the author would express himself a certain way if he were writing in French…can only be achieved by endless deception, constant detours, and departure from the original literal translation’ (Quoted in Oustinoff 2003, 96). Acknowledgements This article was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP15K12846. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Tamako Akiyama teaches at University of Tokyo, Rikkyo University, and several other universities in the Tokyo area. She is a scholar of Chinese language cinema and is responsible for the Japanese language subtitles of many Chinese films, including Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong 1993) and Crazy English (Fengkuang yingyu 1999), Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (Tiexi qu 2003) and Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming 2007), Cong Feng’s Dr. Ma’s Country Clinic (Ma daifu de zhensuo 2008) and Du Haibin’s A Young Patriot (Shaonian Xiao-Zhao 2015). She also has been awarded the Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for her research into contemporary Chinese documentary. Akiyama is currently writing a critical history of the independent Chinese documentary scene as ‘cultural asylum’. JournAl oF CHIneSe CIneMAS 17 References Ariyoshi, Sawako. 1968. Onna futari no Nyugiinia [Two women in New Guinea]. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. Benjamin, Walter. 2000. ‘The Task of the Translator’. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, translated by Harry Zohn, 15–25. London: Routledge. Hata Sahoko. 2013. ‘Kono wasurerarenu kioku’ [This memory that cannot be forgotten]. In Sanshimai [Three sisters], 30–31. Tokyo: Moviola. He Fengming. 2001. Jingli: wo de 1957 nian [Experience: my 1957]. Lanzhou: Dun Huang Wen Yi Chu Ban She. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.’ In On Translation, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kitakoji Takashi. 2013. ‘Wang Bing kantoku sakuhin Fengming—chugoku no kioku o meguru noto’ [‘Notes on director Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir’]. Kyoto Zokei Geijutsu Daigaku Kiyo [Kyoto University of Art and Design Bulletin], no. 2 (November): 248–258. Konosu Yukiko. 2014. ‘Dosutoefusukii to ai ni ikiru’ [Living with Dostoevsky and love (a.k.a. The Woman with Five Elephants)]. Filmed February 24, 2014 in Tokyo. Lecture. Uplink. Murakami, Haruki and Shibata Motoyuki. 2000. Honyaku yawa [Evening translation stories] Tokyo: Bungeishunju. Ooka Jun 大岡淳. 2013. ‘Ano, dan’na-san ga nakunatte ita koto ga wakatta yoru no tokoro…’ [The night she learned that her husband had died…]. Facebook, May 1, 2013. https://www.facebook. com/megumi.iwata/posts/10200956496095602?comment_id =6532758&notif_t=like&__tn__=UK-R. Oustinoff, Michaël. 2003. La traduction [Translation]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Oustinoff, Michaël. 2008. Honyaku—sono rekishi, riron, tenbo. [Translation: its history, theory, and prospects]. Translated by Hattori Yuichi. Tokyo: Hakusuisha. Nornes, Markus. 2004. ‘Toward an Abusive Subtitling: Illuminating Cinema’s Apparatus of Translation.’ In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 447–468. London: Routledge. Nornes, Markus. 2007. Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nornes, Markus. 2017. ‘“Ranyoteki jimaku no tame ni” saiko’ [Afterthoughts on ‘For an Abusive Subtitling’]. 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